Job Hunting? Why You Need a Strong Online Footprint
For job seekers, the persuasive cover letter
and germane resume have long been the way to get a foot in the door, and more
recently, HR directors will rummage through Google to make sure nothing
negative turns up. But now, the extent to which individuals have established a
strong and compelling online presence is having an impact on who gets the
interview and job. Actively building a digital footprint that proves presence
in a professional community and expertise in the field is increasingly
important.
“The idea of curating your digital footprint
is right on target because it gets to the heart of the matter, which is that
this is a new aspect of our reputation that we have to work at,” says Wharton
management professor Nancy Rothbard. “We can’t just assume that it’s good, and we can’t
assume that we’re vigilant enough. We have to think about that carefully.”
Monica McGrath, who recently retired as
Wharton’s vice dean of executive education and is renewing her consulting
practice, says that while professional inquirers tend to look at professional
domains like LinkedIn, no one can assume anything online. “I am surprised by the
number of people who wanted to be sure I had built a presence on blogs
like Huffington Post and other social media outlets. To a
number of potential clients and companies it was important to see if in fact I
had a voice, whether I was an expert or not, and if my approach was
professional and I had something to say,” she notes.
Search firms are taking note of the evolving
awareness around having a digital footprint. Samantha Wallace, market leader of
the technology practice, North America, for Korn Ferry Futurestep, says the
rule of “seven degrees of separation” applies: If a client believes that a
candidate’s digital footprint does not show up in the “right” network, they
might be excluded from consideration. Ultimately, whether a candidate gets
knocked out depends on the importance of an online presence to that particular
job type, and whether the search firm can provide context around why a
particular candidate might be valuable even in the absence of an online
presence. But it’s significant to realize that the burden of proof — why
someone does not have a strong online presence — is shifting. Says Wallace: “If
the client has decided that the digital space is important, and they don’t see
a prospective candidate in that space, that can be detrimental.”
Peter Cappelli, director of Wharton’s Center for Human Resources, calls this “a remarkable shift from corporate practice
years ago when executives were discouraged from being involved in activities
outside of their job because it was a distraction. While one’s current
employer may not want you to do it, that same employer expects it in
candidates.”
Getting Backstage
To neglect a healthy online presence means
increasingly to take a career risk. More than a third of employers say they are
less likely to interview a job candidate for whom no online information can be
found, according to a 2015
CareerBuilder-Harris poll of 2,000 U.S. HR
managers from various industries. More than half said they used social
networking sites to research candidates — up from 39% in 2013. Checking to see whether
a particular candidate had a professional online presence was a major reason
for inquiry, with 56% checking for digital footprint, and 37% seeking to learn
what others were saying about the candidate.
Significantly, around one third of hiring
managers said they learned something online that led directly to a job offer.
Curiosity has gone as far as asking job candidates for user names and passwords
to social media accounts, since a deeper layer of comments and other
information is available only with that kind of access. Privacy advocates have
been alarmed, and government has taken action. State lawmakers began
considering legislation in 2012 preventing employers from requesting access to
personal Internet accounts so that individuals might get or keep a job, and
nine states passed such legislation in 2015, according to the
National Conference of State Legislatures.
Some states extend protection to students and
prospective students, tenants and landlords, educational institutions and labor
organizations. But, as Rothbard points out: “There are sneaky ways around it.
If you have someone on your staff who is already [Facebook] friends with that
person, then they have access, and I think that happens, too.”
All of this makes Erving Goffman’s The Presentation
of Self In Everyday Life seem all the more
prescient. In the book, published in 1956, the sociologist used metaphors of
the theater: people are actors, consciously packaging their most positive
qualities for public consumption, while they are more apt to be genuine in
their more backstage, or private, versions of themselves. The Internet has
blurred the line between the two.
“I
think employers see this as a way to get to the backstage, and understand that
this is where the authentic person is Twitter — who are they when they let their impression
management down?” says Rothbard. “Whether they find out, or find out that the
person doesn’t actually reveal that much, that may be OK. If you don’t reveal
yourself in your private space, then maybe you won’t do anything embarrassing
to the company.”
Finding out information about potential
employees and knowing whether it’s important are two different things. “Being
successful as a manager or executive is completely different from having an
online audience,” says Cappelli. “So if hiring managers are focused on the
latter, they are unlikely to get someone who will be successful in the job they
are trying to fill.”
But, access or not, revelation or none, the
elimination of the fourth wall — to continue Goffman’s theater metaphor —
leaves employers and employees struggling to rewrite their roles. “I think it’s
really very uncomfortable,” says Rothbard. “The question of privacy is becoming
incredibly problematized in society in general, but not just as a matter of
employers asking to log on and look at Facebook.” Google knows “almost
everything about you,” she notes, and the amount of information that these
companies have about our digital footprints is enormous. “The whole people
analytics movement is geared toward getting its hands around the enormous pile
of data we have about individuals, and there’s a very interesting question
around privacy that has yet to be answered.”
Fashioning a Digital
Footprint
To apply for this job, “attach a resume, and
provide links to your social media accounts or personal blog.” So states one
recent job posting for social media strategist at BuzzFeed. Evidence of digital
footprint is a prerequisite for that job since developing a digital
footprint is the job. But what about other jobs? Should a
potential employer expect evidence of an online presence for a doctor,
copywriter or chef? There is certainly leeway, but in many professions, it’s
reasonable to expect a digital presence in some obvious professional online
meeting places, says Jon Bischke, CEO of Entelo, the San Francisco recruiting
software platform provider.
“The reality is, there’s a lot more
professional data about people out there than there was five or 10 years ago,”
he says. “There are new professional networks — I can go to an engineers’ page
and download code, and for a designer I can go to Dribbble and assess their
design skills. I think that gets you close to someone’s abilities. When you
have these communities that become the community of record for a particular
industry, it can raise eyebrows about why someone does not have a profile on
that site. It really depends on the job. If I am hiring someone to do marketing
and that person has no online presence, that’s a red flag. If it’s an engineer,
I’m not going to worry that an engineer can’t do his job because he doesn’t
have an online presence.”
If job hunters, especially in certain
professions, are at a disadvantage when they don’t actively tend their digital
footprint, these are early days in knowing exactly what it means to establish
oneself online as an expert. A lot of it is subjective, says Korn Ferry’s
Wallace. “I think that the concept of saying someone is an expert based on
their digital footprint remains ambiguous, because typically a digital
footprint is created by the individual themselves, and they are creating the
story, and if they are doing it deliberately they are going to find the
connections to promote themselves as an expert in the field.”
Bischke has three recommendations for
job-seekers looking to establish a healthy digital footprint. “The first piece
of advice is simple, but Google yourself. You want to make sure those initial
links are professional and up to date. A lot of people don’t even do that,” he
says. “A lot of what is going to pop up is on LinkedIn or your Facebook
profile. Sometimes, what will come up are things that are inaccurate or
misleading. Reputation.com will work with people in those scenarios where
someone has the same name as someone convicted of a crime.”
Second, Bischke says it is important to
develop professional profiles on sites and forums for your specific profession.
Third, is to make sure that professional information is presented consistently
across various sites, so as not to plant the idea in any prospective employer’s
mind that the facts are being embellished or stretched. “What you want to do as
much as possible is try to control the brand around your name,” Bischke notes.
Says Rothbard: “The power, but also the
potential pitfall, of the digital online world is that we can really have our
personal brand out there. This personal brand can follow us and really enhance
our reputation — or detract from it if we mess it up, if we don’t manage it
well.”
Part of the expectation surrounding digital
presence is generational — in terms of the amount of presence, but also in the
way that presence is expressed in the professional realm. Millennials project a
different sense of self than their elders, and that will transform the dialogue
in coming years. Millennials account for 36% of the U.S. workforce today,
according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and will emerge as 75% of the
global workforce by 2025.
What’s evolving, Wallace notes, is the
“acceptable way to communicate.” Millennials have grown up in the “bring your
authentic self to work” era, and don’t hesitate to use a backstage voice across
all venues, including in their digital footprint. For non-millennials, “if you
want to communicate in a business environment, you think about how you are
framing that, and a text and a smiley face doesn’t cut it,” she says. “But for
the new generation of business leaders, it does.”
http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/job-hunting-why-you-need-a-strong-online-footprint-to-get-a-foot-in-the-door/?utm_source=kw_newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=2016-02-03
No comments:
Post a Comment